27-03-2025
A Duke startup raises $5M for a new treatment for lung injuries
VQ Biomedical, a startup born at Duke University, has secured $5 million in funding to advance a device it says will treat severe lung injuries in a less invasive way.
Why it matters: The medical device startup is charting a new way to alleviate acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) — a potentially deadly condition where a person's lungs fill with fluid due to an infection or injury.
In the worst cases, ARDS is treated using mechanical ventilation or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), which pumps blood to and from the patient's body through an external machine that adds oxygen, removes carbon dioxide and regulates temperature.
Between the lines: But those treatments come with their own health risks.
ECMO, especially, is expensive, requires specialized personnel to operate and requires patients to go on blood thinners.
VQ's device — using technology from Duke's medical and engineering schools — instead uses a catheter to deliver oxygen directly into the bloodstream without having to pump any of the patient's blood outside the body.
Driving the news: The funding comes from a collection of sources, including a $1.65 million seed investment led by Harbright Ventures, the Wolfpack Investor Network and Duke Capital Partners.
The company is also receiving a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. military's research organization the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as well as grants from the N.C. Biotechnology Center and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
The catheter's compact design and minimal equipment makes it attractive to the U.S. military as a potential option for treating lung injuries in battlefield settings.
Zoom in: Founded in 2023, VQ Biomedical is led by its CEO Galen Robertson, who previously worked at the Durham-based medical-device company 410 Medical, and its chief medical officer Tobias Straube, a professor at Duke's medical school and the catheter's primary inventor.
What they're saying: "This funding allows us to advance the prototype," Robertson told Axios.
At the moment, he said, the firm has a prototype of the device to prove it works, but the goal is to make the device even smaller and easier to use for hospital workers.
"With ECMO and mechanical ventilation, they are career fields where people are specially trained in how to operate it," Robertson said. "Our device is going to be much, much simpler to operate. ... @e'll be able to do an in-service training over the course of a couple hours and train a nurse how to use our device."
